John Lanchester’s feisty I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (see my review) suggests one idea that hadn’t occurred to me: perhaps the roots of the GFC lie in the end of the Cold War. Put simply (and not in the precise terms Lanchester uses), capitalism had needed to show a ‘human face’ when socialism presented an alternative societal model. The Berlin Wall is torn down . . . and the face grows less humanistic.
Lanchester even returns to this notion at the end of his must-read book. He suggests a reason why the post-GFC world has raised no alternative models: ‘Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more.’
How interesting! The kernel of a novel suggests itself to me . . .